National Security Priorities for the 21st Century

About the Author

Let me begin with a request for a moment of
prayerful silence on behalf of the thousands of victims of the
events of September 11: people who died, were burned, or maimed;
people who left children, wives, husbands, parents, sisters and
brothers, friends and relatives--without explanation or
understanding, without time to say "Goodbye"--all for no reason
other than the fact that fanatical, deranged people in another part
of the world presumed that their sordid view of the world was
justification to snuff out the lives of thousands of innocent men,
women, and children in America.

Please take a moment with me to pay
tribute to those innocent souls and to ask God's blessing on
them--and on us for the work we must do to insure that others do
not follow in their path.

* * *

Obviously, my presentation today is
different from what it might have been two weeks ago. I was asked
to speak on defense, but the meaning of "defense" is different
today. I am different. We are different. The whole nation, even the
world, is different, all because of these horrific acts perpetrated
against Americans, against the world and what I would characterize
as democracy--indeed, against civilization itself.

An Effective Defense for AmericaFuture
indefensible, evil, and heinous acts such as these must be
prevented and defended against, and the only way we can reasonably
defend against them is to eliminate their perpetrators. That
entails a defense not as we know it, but one far better--more
comprehensive, more thorough, more intrusive and more
painstaking--than what we have today. And it entails an offensive
capability that is equal to anything we've mobilized in the past
against known enemies, but far more lethal and effective in its
ability to search out and target and destroy the hidden and
cowardly enemies who blend in among innocent pawns and shills in
order to cover their murderous tracks.

To
adequately mobilize either our defense or offense, we must reassess
and overhaul our military and intelligence resources, wisely and
selectively, without throwing money indiscriminately at the problem
but also without blind adherence to bureaucratic budgetary rules
that hamstring our ability to mobilize.

This
means weeding out the lethargic, ineffective institutions that
gather around our fighting forces, like plaque on the unbrushed
tooth, to gum and rot and decay the internal machinery of our eager
and effective personnel. It means sharpening our lines of
responsibility and ceasing inter-agency competition in
intelligence, law enforcement, and national defense. It means
supporting Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in trimming
unneeded forces and reapplying their resources to those units which
remain, in order to avoid spreading the remaining forces too thin
or maintaining numerous less effective forces.

Likewise, it means closing bases that
remain open solely for political reasons, rather than military
ones. It means that we must be more conscious of not only our
defense budget, but also our entire federal budget, which for too
long has neglected the needs--both personnel and structural--of our
military.

Defense Spending vs. Mandatory
ProgramsWe won the
Cold War. We destroyed Saddam Hussein's army in Iraq. And then we
sat back.

Over
the past nine years, we deployed our troops all over the globe but
failed to adequately support their ability to respond to truly
serious threats to our own national security, let alone to
adequately support their quality of life. It is no wonder that we
have fallen behind, when we look at the decline in our overall
defense budget compared to the defense budget 40 years ago.

Defense spending has dwindled from half of
our entire federal budget in 1962, to less than one-sixth of our
budget today. 1962 was the middle of Jack Kennedy's heyday. The
Cold War was up and running, and we spent one-half of every dollar
on defense. Today, we are spending less on defense as a percentage
of our GDP--3 percent--than we have since the beginning of the
Great Depression.

I
know that the President and the Congress have agreed to increase
spending by some $40 billion in reaction to last week's holocaust,
and I applaud their efforts, but much of that will be dedicated to
simply rebuilding what was lost last week. They need to do much
more than that if we are to succeed in standing up to the threats
of the future.

We
really need a budget overhaul, and our long-term spending trend
"from guns to butter" needs a serious reexamination. We saw this
with clarity last week.

We
also saw that government is not the enemy, and that a civilized
society needs conscientious, effective government. Those policemen,
firemen, and emergency workers in New York and Washington were
heroes; many of them gave their own lives to aid their neighbors.
Certainly, government is critical to our very survival.

But
while spending for some programs must inevitably rise, Congress
should take the initiative and have the discipline to cut and
repeal outdated, wasteful government programs. Today, as shown in
the charts, mandatory spending, which is not reevaluated
annually--and often not for 10 or 15 years or more at a time--is
eclipsing the rest of the budget.

Mandatory spending, which creates
automatic draws on our treasury, has grown from one-third of our
budget in 1962 to over two-thirds today. Surely, some of this
increase is due to programs of the social safety net such as Social
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but political pressures have also
caused the transfer of well over a hundred other programs (such as
spending for the Everglades and agricultural subsidies) to the
mandatory category.

Each entitlement and mandatory program should be
evaluated and, when possible, moved to the discretionary side of
the budget. This is absolutely critical to allow budgeters and
appropriators to use discretion in funding programs that otherwise
would be locked into place without adequate oversight. This is
necessary with regard to the domestic as well as the defense
budget.

Full Participation of CongressCongress
needs to abandon such budgetary gimmicks as arbitrary caps, lock
boxes, and similar quick fixes and make government live within its
means by asserting discretion and judgment over the federal budget.
We actually did this in the late 1990s when, over the objections of
President Bill Clinton, we eliminated over 300 unnecessary
programs.

Budget-trimming Members ought to have even
more success now that President George W. Bush is at the helm. But
to get there, they need to provide oversight, and that means that
Congress must show up for work on a five-day schedule, rather than
the current two-day one. We did show up five days a week 20 years
ago, but we slipped away from a normal workweek as politics became
more important than substance and as Members began leaving their
families in their home states.

Today, in most weeks, Congress convenes on
Tuesday night and leaves on Thursday afternoon for long weekends
with their families in their congressional districts. That leaves
only Wednesdays, and possibly Thursday mornings, for any hearings
since Members aren't even in Washington at any other time.
Furthermore, because they are assigned to multiple committees and
subcommittees, few, if any, Members other than the chairman and
ranking member are present at a typical hearing on Capitol
Hill.

That's unworkable, and it has to be
changed now. Members should be available for hearings throughout
the workweek. They should provide oversight by holding regular
hearings to determine what works and what doesn't and which
functions of government are worthwhile and which aren't. They
should then exercise their judgment to terminate those functions
that are not worthwhile and to pare down or eliminate those
expenditures that are wasteful, redundant, unnecessary, or
counterproductive.

Promoting a Vibrant EconomyNow, I
don't want any of my remarks to imply opposition to the tax cut of
last spring. On the contrary, I applaud the President and the
Congress for the tax cut. I only wish that it had been bigger and
more front-end-loaded, since a reduced supply of money compels the
Congress to do that which they were elected to do--make
discretionary judgments between that which is effective and that
which is not.

With
hundreds, maybe thousands, of duplicative, redundant, and wasteful
programs in government, there is plenty of room in the nearly $2
trillion budget to cut inefficiency and allow for the truly
necessary expenditures. There is no reason whatsoever why the
American people--being taxed at the highest level in peacetime
history--should not enjoy some tax relief to reapply their own
money to productive purposes and to reenergize commerce at a time
when we are threatened by recession from a declining stock market
as well as by actions from enemies abroad.

There is a desperate need to reduce the
capital gains tax. Even with the tax cuts and the slower economy,
we are still currently generating the second largest surplus in any
government budget in the history of the world. A $160 billion
surplus means that our needs--be they for Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, or defense--are met and will be met for the
foreseeable future, and that money is still left over, even after
the tax cuts.

Does
that mean we needn't worry about the future with respect to those
programs? Of course not. Some of those programs demand an overhaul,
or they will be incapable of meeting the needs of our children. But
for today, people who are eligible for entitlements and those most
in need will have their needs met.

Undoubtedly, the only guarantee future
generations have that their needs will be met is the strength of
the American economy. The ultimate "lock box" is the American
economy, so we must exert every tool at our disposal to protect and
nourish it. If our economy collapses, we are all in deep trouble,
and the programs we regard as sacrosanct will not be
guaranteed.

So
we must protect our economy, and the only way to do that is to
encourage and cultivate the private sector, which is the only real
producer of wealth in this world. There is no better way to do that
than by reduction of taxes and interest rates; we are already doing
both this year, and we could do more.\

Honing Our Defensive and Offensive
ForcesWe know we must re-prioritize, that we must use our
resources more rationally and efficiently, and that we must upgrade
and hone our defensive and offensive forces. How? First of all, by
increasing our procurement of weaponry, ships, planes, and land
vehicles--to fight the next war, not the last.

In the past 10 years, we have gone through
our defense assets with astonishing rapidity.

U.S. forces have been deployed some 34
times in the past 8 years, versus only 10 times in the preceding 40
years of the Cold War.

Our bomber force (B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s)
is severely limited. The B-52s will be roughly 90 years old by the
time the next bomber is produced under today's production
schedules. The B-1s are of modest value, and we only have 21
B-2s--and of those, only 16 are operational.

Our existing fleet of seagoing vessels has
an average age of 27 years and an expected service life of only 35
years. We are currently replacing them at the rate of only 6.5
ships per year, though we need to be producing at least 8.7 ships
per year to maintain a 300-ship Navy--and even that would not
really be enough, if we are to maintain dominance.

Our active duty force structure has been
cut by 700,000 people since 1985, and when adjusted for inflation,
our defense budget has fallen by $150 billion.

Thirty-eight percent of our Army, 40
percent of our Air Force, and 35 percent of our Naval personnel
have been cut, yet we still provide substandard housing for the
troops that remain.

Moreover, the maintenance and operations
of our equipment has been curtailed for budgetary reasons, and with
the increased detailing of personnel to peacekeeping and police
details around the world, our retention of experienced troops is
severely threatened.

Yet
sheer numbers of troops is not the central issue. Quality of life,
training, planning, and provision of effective and well-maintained
war-fighting paraphernalia is. Thus, it is absolutely imperative
that Congress provides Secretary Rumsfeld with the money and the
latitude to make institutional changes so that our soldiers,
sailors, Marines, and airmen are capable of meeting the threats of
the 21st century.

Preparing for Threats of the 21st
CenturyThe evil and cowardly people who attacked us last week are
indicative of the changing world in which we are threatened.
Surely, we also face technologically modern states led by tyrants
and dictators as well. We have come to realize that not everyone
likes us, and those current or future enemies--be they individuals
or leaders of countries--may strike out at us at any time, in any
way possible: with knives to overpower our civilian airlines, with
weapons of mass destruction in briefcases or baggage, or by
launching missiles at us if they can acquire them.

This
means we must safeguard our planes, our trains, all our modes of
transportation, and the people who run them. We must protect our
monuments, our buildings, our landmarks, our water and food
supplies, and--above all--our people and our armed forces, wherever
they are deployed.

Deploying
Missile Defense
Inherent in this task is the necessity of deploying a missile
defense immediately--without further delay. The Clinton
Administration studied the issue to death, but it would never use
the word "deploy." We must use the word, and we must activate
it.

Opponents who deride what they cynically
call "Star Wars" have said that the systems would not work. Our
tests have proven that they do. Critics say that we cannot afford
it. In fact, we cannot afford to neglect it or fail to deploy it.
Opponents say that it would violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty, but the only signatories to that treaty were the United
States and the Soviet Union, and there is no more Soviet Union.
Thus, in effect, it's a treaty with ourselves, and, of course, we
can renounce and withdraw from a treaty with ourselves--especially
since the very wording in that treaty permits a party to withdraw
after giving six months notice to other signatories.

Critics say that such action would offend
China or North Korea. It should be kept in mind that not only are
those two countries not signatories and, hence, not bound by the
treaty, but also that neither has abided by the terms of a single
nuclear non-proliferation treaty to which it was a signatory in the
last 50 years. In short, the opponents of an effective missile
defense system for the American people have run out of
arguments.

We
need not choose between defending against terrestrial terror and
air- or space-borne terror: We must defend against both. We lost
over 5,000 people last week. Would those who rail against "Star
Wars" risk the possibility of losing 5 million people next year?
That's what is at stake if we do not protect ourselves against the
Osama bin Ladens, the Saddam Husseins, the Muammar Qadhafis, and
the Kim Jong-Ils.

These people are a threat to us, and they
and others could now have, or may soon have, missiles and/or
weapons of mass destruction. How do we explain to our children that
we knew it was possible that they might use them, but we just
didn't think they would do it? This is not a question for a later
time: It's a question that we must ask now, given what happened
last week.

Employing Our
Intelligence Resources
Clearly, our intelligence, military, and political apparatuses
were insufficient to prevent the attacks of last week. We failed
our children; we failed our people; and we failed our country. We
knew when Saddam Hussein threatened us that he meant it. We knew
that when Muammar Qadhafi said that if he had had missiles at his
disposal, he would have dropped a bomb on New York he meant it. We
are fairly certain that he was responsible for the destruction of
Pan Am flight 103.

We
have repeatedly heard the North Koreans and even the Chinese
threaten us or our friends and allies such as Taiwan with missiles,
and we have most certainly heard Osama bin Laden's threats and
witnessed the destruction of the Khobar Towers in Daharan, our
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Africa, and the USS Cole in Aden,
Yemen. We should have known that sooner or later we would find the
evil of terrorism not just in the Middle East, or in Europe, or
Africa, but on our own soil.

It
has now arrived. We were warned, but we were not ready. What do we
tell our children? I hope we tell them that, while we can never be
absolutely safe, we will exert every possible effort to avoid such
catastrophes in the future.

President Bush was right in declaring war
on the perpetrators. He was right in asserting, "We will make no
distinction between those who committed these acts and those who
harbor them." But he should also act to repeal the executive orders
that prevent us from using criminals to catch worse criminals. He
should repeal the order that prevents an American President from
targeting an individual enemy. And he should heed the suggestion of
former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who recommended combining the Border
Patrol, the Immigration Service, the Coast Guard, Customs, and the
Agriculture Inspectors under the umbrella of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) to guard our borders and coastlines
against hostile foreign incursion.

Taking a Fresh
Look at Our Investigative ForcesFinally, the President should take a fresh look at our
investigative forces deployed overseas to reduce inter-agency
rivalries and the redundancies.

The
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an effort in the
1990s to put agents all over the world--ostensibly to prevent
terrorism and drugs from coming to the shores of the United States.
Obviously, they have failed. I believed then, and so testified when
I was in Congress, that this was a misbegotten effort.

The
FBI is a great institution that has done a tremendous amount of
good for the American people; but with the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Office of State Department Security,
the State Department itself, and all the Consular Corps from all
the other departments scattered all over the globe, the addition of
the FBI to stations around the world did little, if anything, for
our intelligence apparatus and only provided another conflicting
overlap of bureaucracy to deal with people who have little
knowledge or care whether they were talking to the FBI, the CIA, or
one of the other U.S. alphabet-soup agencies to provide sensitive
information. The likelihood of leaks and miscommunication was
enhanced, and our security was subject to endangerment by
cooperating informants, as evidenced by the revelation of super
counterspy and traitor Robert Hanssen.

When
the USS Cole was struck, the FBI sent
hundreds of agents over to Yemen, many of whom couldn't speak the
local language, and on receipt of further terrorist threats, they
were herded into a compound where they gathered intelligence from
each other and posed a target for more terrorists. They were of
little help to the DIA after our troops were hit by a car bomb in
Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and they were unable to prevent or
apprehend those responsible for the bombing of our embassies in
Africa. In short, FBI agents are, at best, redundant and
unnecessary to the worldwide investigations by other agencies and,
at worst, are simply in the way.

We
need experienced linguists and spies abroad. The other agencies are
capable of providing that. The FBI, originally intended as our
domestic intelligence service, provides little or no advantage in
our efforts abroad. Instead, they have diluted their own
effectiveness. They have seriously failed to maintain their
laboratories and failed to provide quality investigations and/or
follow through in the bombing cases of Atlanta and Oklahoma. They
were unable to prevent the dissemination of private files to
political hacks in the White House, and they could not prevent
traitorous moles from invading the most vital of departments--such
as their own counterintelligence section, in which they suffered a
Soviet mole for as long as 25 years who was not given a single lie
detector test in the last 15 years.

Overhauling the
Intelligence AgenciesThe FBI should be brought back to the United States and
mandated to become, once again, the premier domestic investigative
and counterintelligence body they once were. The CIA and DIA should
be overhauled as intelligence agencies and provided with the
resources and the license to do their jobs without political
interference. State Department Security should be entrusted with
the role in which they were once engaged as the chief law
enforcement agency abroad--working in tandem with the DEA, which
should enforce our drug laws in coordinated action around the
world. Only then will we again have clear lines of
responsibility.

Furthermore, those leaders who are unable
to fulfill their responsibilities should be summarily sacked. We
have the technical ability to know everything about anything that
moves in any place on Earth. Our limitations are self-imposed--by
budget restrictions, organizational infighting, and a lack of
initiative to deal with difficult legal issues so that we can
enhance our capabilities while preserving our way of life.

But
we have the power to overcome all of these obstacles, and God
willing, we shall. This is the very least we owe to our children
and ourselves.

We
have suffered greatly--as a nation, as a people, and as individuals
and families--in the last week. Let us not despair and hide from
the declaration of war that has been thrust upon us. Let us accept
our lot and heed the call. Let us upgrade our defense and our
intelligence networks and seek out the enemy and annihilate him. He
is evil incarnate, and we should show no mercy.

But
we must take care not to hurt innocent people unnecessarily, lest
we become what we fight. We must upgrade our resources, target our
enemy, and defeat him so that our children's children will once
again live in a safe and peaceful world.

The Honorable Robert L.
Livingston is chairman of the Livingston Group, L.L.C., in
Washington, D.C. From 1977 until 1999, he represented the First
District of Louisiana in the U.S. House of Representatives, serving
as a member (and, from 1995 until 1998, as chairman) of the
Committee on Appropriations and member of the Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence.